Paintings in real estate agencies and cries for Palestine: a Night of Art full of contrasts

PalmGalleries, museums and other art centers will forgive us, but if we understand art as a way of representing reality with a certain critical spirit, the most artistic scene that has been experienced in Palma this Saturday, September 20, the day in which the twenty-ninth edition of the Night of Art was held, was Chopin. There a series of unusual events occurred, images that had little or nothing to do, apparently, with each other, but that, due to their coincidence, served as a precise definition of current times.

On the one hand, the square has been the location chosen for a pro-Palestine rally that had not received authorization from the City Council, although it had received the approval of the Government Delegation. Shouts of "Long live the Palestinian resistance" mingled with applause when Laura Camargo read that "we hope that Netanyahu and the rest of those responsible have their Nuremberg." While the reading of the statement continued, in the art shops surrounding the square, such as Gallery Red and Gerhardt Braun, the umpteenth bottle of champagne was being poured, the same thing was happening inside the new real estate agency that is yet to open in the same location, Sotheby's, linked to the well-known Art, where some of the works of the Alaronera Neni Vallés Rechach could be seen. Not far from there, in the Plaza del Mercat, two ghostly figures were leading a peculiar procession organized by the organization Mallorca para vivir, led by a sign that read "Where the fuck do you think these children are going to live?[[Where the hell do you think our children will live?]] The altarpiece, then, spoke for itself, and contained numerous, and very powerful, ingredients.

Cala d'Or, artificial intelligence and a cosmic gaze

However, anyone who has ever been to the Night of Art knows that this event isn't designed to stop at anything and that the general dynamic encourages you to move quickly, to make progress, because if you want to be everywhere, you don't have time to stay still. Thus, starting at six in the evening, the time at which the media had been officially summoned to the La Bibi + Reus City gallery, a kind of race against time began, with authorities, gallery owners, and the media meeting at the hot spots of the night to take a quick look. The first stop, therefore, was at the gallery that emerged from the merger of La Bibi and Fran Reus, a space located on Vilanova de Ciutat street where the exhibition was inaugurated. Plastic street, a series of brightly colored paintings and disturbing messages (with phrases like "I'm afraid you are infected"["I suspect you have been infected"]) with which the artists Maite and Manuel, from Uruguay, have recreated their impressions after having settled in Cala d'Or.

One of the most photographed places of the night, in any case, has once again been the Solleric Casal. As happened two years ago, when One of the protagonists of the Night of Art was Sandra Baía's installation, this year it has been a work of Jesús Rafael Soto, Penetrable, a large platform made of countless blue threads that has been covering the Solleric courtyard since this Saturday. To access it, you must cross another construction site, Impenetrable, by Eugenio Espinoza, which extends above the stairs leading to the complex. Furthermore, at Solleric you can enjoy The artist is dead, long live the AI ​​​​["The artist is dead, long live AI"], an exhibition by Pelayo Varela that invites us to reflect on concepts such as authorship and creation and their current links with artificial intelligence.

Nearby, at the Pelaires gallery, the works of artists such as Katherine Bradford, Gori Mora and James Owens offered heterogeneous but complementary perspectives on identity and its manifestations in the 21st century, in the collective exhibition Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme ["Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme"], while Room C of Es Baluard welcomed visitors, transformed into a cosmic set thanks to the installation Prelude to the Sun and the Stars by Sandra Cinto, a project created specifically for this space that seems to have the capacity to absorb visitors: around eight in the evening, silence and pause reigned at this point of the tour, something almost unprecedented in the rest of the Ciutat during the Night of Art.

Very close to Es Baluard, in the Aba Art Lab gallery, two artists were sharing stories about the Night of Art. "This is the fourth time I've opened an exhibition," stated Miquel Mesquida, and Teresa Matas added that "I've come so many times that I've lost count." The meeting was on the occasion of the opening ofikigai, Mesquida's latest exhibition, in which the lightness of organic forms seems to move toward immensity in a series of paintings and sculptures with striking colors and a solemn presence. "I think the exhibition comes from a need to seek the purpose of life and represent it," the artist suggested, "but, at the end of the day, the purpose of artists is precisely to do what we do," he concluded. Meanwhile, at the other end of the Plaza de la Puerta de Santa Catalina, halfway between Aba and Es Baluard, another establishment was offering cava to visitors, its doors wide open and its managers well changed: the Palma Hair Concept hair salon, which just a few days ago shared its products on social media with a message in English, which this year, more than ever, has highlighted the contrasts of Ciutat.